List of content farms

Now that Google has an official extension to block domains from search engine results, I thought it would be handy to list the largest and most prevalent content farms. Google’s Personal Blocklist works well, but doesn’t let you access a shared block list so it’s up to you to have a good list. It also makes you add sites from Google search result pages, so you’ll have to search for these domains and use the new block links that get injected by the extension. It’s a few more hoops to jump through than I’d like, but well worth it for less spammy SERPs going forward.

Update: Google has now made this an official feature of their web search, so there’s no longer a Chrome extension required. It’s a bit more of a hassle to block sites with, but having cross browser support is a big win (I was already bugging out seeing spam results in my mobile searches).

Update on March 23rd 2013: Google has removed the Blocked Sites feature and is suggesting everyone use the extension. The list below should still be a good starting place.

This is an official extension… Google gets notified when you add a site to the blocklist (and remove it). They are going to use the data received to help with SERP rankings in the future. This will also likely become a feature in Google directly, without the need for an extension. Matt Cutts said that a Chrome extension was simply much much easier to deploy and they did that so data can start coming in to analyze.

I’d rather be pro-active and help Google figure out what the trash is then sit around complaining about how bad their results are and then complaining when they do something about it that requires input from other people.

‘Looks’ like it might be something? That’s hardly a good reason to advertise shutting down another person’s hard work. I like wonderhowto. I went to it for the first time today after seeing it on your list. When I was a kid, my favorite books were the original ‘Tell Me Why’ series. WonderHowTo brings me back to those exceptional chapters of information. There are information farms out there with an owner intention to get clicking traffic from regurgitated content culled from others sites. Wonderhowto has created an awesome site that lets others post their own work.

What other reason could I have? They absolutely aggregate content they don’t own for the purpose of selling advertising against it. It’s a content farm. WonderHowTo doesn’t add value. If you like it then by all means don’t block it, but I’d rather never see it in my search results and all this page contains is a list of sites that *I* don’t want to see in my search results.

This will eventually be server side, but it takes a lot more effort/approval/scaling to do so. It’s a good first step. The feature I’m most waiting for is import/export of block lists so we can make it easier to share. Well that and syncing–kind of tedious for multiple computers.

I’d prefer one that verified any porn content described in text was actually present in images/videos. Goddamit, if I click on a link for “redheaded midgets with bananas in three-ways with bald clowns”, that’s what I expect to SEE when I get there!

I thought about both, but they are less content farms and more news sites edited for SEO priorities. I often get annoyed reading articles at each, but don’t often see them in SERPs (I don’t search for news stories apparently).

I can’t tell if you’re joking or not, but Experts Exchange is one of the worst offenders. The beauty of a personal block list though is that we can disagree and both be happy. I never want to see any EE content ever again (and I won’t!), but you can continue to see them.

I really hope for your sake you’re joking, but just in case you’re not, do yourself a favor and check out stackexchange.com. It’s roughly 1 billion times better than experts-exchange, and doesn’t cost anything.

I’m with JG on this – annoyance at worthless content from the utterly pointless experts-exchange website is what triggered me to search for a block-list that I can import. But it’s a personal choice, so if you find it useful not to blacklist it, don’t

I think the difference with pages like experts-exchange and stackexchange is that they go about providing answers different. Experts-exchange is spammy and appears to lure visitors in to paid subscriptions. stackexchange (a *very* different website) allows free sign ups and is geared towards community help provided by the community for free. IMHO, experts-exchange indeed does belong on this block list. I hate coming across their “results” in searches.

demandmedia.com is just the corporate site–it doesn’t have much content or show up in SERPs unless you’re looking for information on Demand Media. I added their main sites though (eHow/Livestrong/AnswerBag).

Real people building real pages about topics they care about. Just like WordPress or Typepad, our users aren’t in it for the money (though some of them hope to be).

My sense of a content farm is that it is manufactured, calculating and without heart. People building pages on specific topics because they’re paid to, doing the minimum amount necessary to get a check.

That’s not Squidoo. I think tarring us with the same brush as some other sites is just plain wrong, and I hope you’ll give it another look.

I have only ever been disappointed by content on Squidoo. Do you have any good examples? Every time I have visited it seems like the page is created by an entry-level interent marketer / SEO who’s trying to hock affiliate products or generate backlinks for a site where they hock affiliate products. I just took another browse through and every page I found fell into either or both of these categories.

I have bought several of your books and enjoyed them, but I have never been impressed with Squidoo. But luckily these are individual blocklists, so people who have a different opinion can continue to see Squidoo in SERPs.

Of the 2.2 million pages on Squidoo, we expose less than half of them to the search engine robots. Our really good users keep making ever better pages, and I think it’s a valuable service, one that doesn’t work nearly as well if sites like ours are blocked by a central system.

You’re correct that your list is just a list, but I think your intent is to be fair, and our intent, and our top 10,000 users’ passion is to build unique, useful and updated pages that people are glad to see.

I hope you’ll reconsider and focus this list on the automated, the impersonal and the useless.

Google has 8.2 million Squidoo pages in its index, so you may want to check on your robots.txt or however you’re limiting what gets indexed…

As for the content, I just checked out the first one (Star Wars Cakes) and it’s full of unattributed photos that are not [apparently] used with permission. Click through and see the photos on Flickr with the “All Rights Reserved” portion. Stolen content full of ads and affiliate links (literally 100+ on the single page) isn’t exactly high quality. Oh and also the SEO filled cross promotion for her other similarly low quality work. Simply visiting the Flickr pool where the author stole most of her content from would be a much more fulfilling experience: http://www.flickr.com/groups/979703@N25/

I disagree about YA as well a majority of the people provide helpful answers. I know there are those trolls who provide inane answers or ask ridiculous question. But most, in my case, provide well thought out answers and site where they got the information

What mailing lists are you finding useful on mail-archive that aren’t available elsewhere? Do you ever visit mail-archive directly? I’ve only seen mail-archive clutter up SERP pages, often with the question I have going unanswered. I see no point in duplicating content on Google Groups, only with a significantly worse UI.

I’m not sure which I’m landing on, but it’s never failed me. Perhaps my queries are longer or shorter than what your’s have been. Mind you… mail-archive has been around longer than google groups not to mention that google drops properties on occasion too.

I see no value in copying a mailing list that already exists online (Debian, Ubuntu, Google Groups, etc). It’s content spam. For mailing lists that aren’t available online it would be useful, but it’s no longer 1998 and Mail-Archive has no use in a world where everything is already available online.

It was created in 1998 when it was common for mailing lists to simply exist in email form so there weren’t archives around to browse unless you had already been subscribed to the list. While I never took advantage of it then, I’m sure it was helpful for some people. However things changed and mailing lists are almost all online (or not even mailing lists anymore as things like forums have taken over). Mail Archive is now simply duplicating content and cluttering results pages.

Then don’t add it to your list, simple as that. Personally, I find it as useless as eHow (maybe even more since it’s all duplicate content). This shows why Google has a hard time with the problem–people find content to be of varying qualities.

I disagree with some of these items. For example used ehow.com just the other day to figure out how to rewire a lamp, helping me figure out which side of the unmarked power wire was positive. There is a value in some of these sites, the problem is that they have too much weight. I would rather be able to assign a 0-5 priority to sites.

I compared them without adblock turned on and the ads on thisoldhouse.com are actually more annoying (popup). I think this whole matter can be highly subjective, so it would be important to pay attention to any shared lists that one might paste into this extension.

How could you possibly forget about answers.com (and wiki.answers.com)?
Simply google this: site:answers.com “can you answer this question?”

32,200,000 of their 103,000,000 answers pages DO NOT HAVE AN ANSWER! They are spamming google’s users to get them to build answer.com’s database of answers.

For the pages that do have an answer, answers.com has gone the way of answers.yahoo.com. Their results are CRAP!

Ask.com is even worse, now that they are choosing not to do search but trying to break into the content farm business. Virtually all of their answers are from other sites. MAXing out the SPAM ratio now.

In my opinion, well over half of the sites you’ve listed provide high-quality, relevant content. The moral of this story is that the nerds (who are the only ones complaining about this) wouldn’t know “quality content” if it jumped up and bit them on the ass. The highest-quality result is the one that answers my question, not the one with the cleanest grammar and least amount of spelling mistakes. ehow regularly answers my questions quickly and efficiently. In fact, just last week I repaired my washing machine thanks entirely to an article on ehow. That is the very definition of “quality” content. Your whining only shows your ignorance.

Neither. I just think you paint with the broad brush strokes of a kindergartener but have somehow convinced yourself you’re Van Gogh. Just because you don’t find value in a site doesn’t mean most other people don’t. The market has spoken and guess what? It says you’re wrong.

You sure that you don’t write for eZine Articles? It really looks like you do. It also looks like you right some made for AdSense personal finance content on amateurassetallocator.com… If that’s not you, someone else in your city is using your name and email address to make comments that appear to make you a liar.

That is me, however, I certainly don’t own any made-for-adsense sites. Your comments lead me to believe you do not, in fact, know what “made-for-adsense” means. There’s a huge difference between a MFA site and a personal blog that happens to have adsense on it.

1.) I didn’t notice EZA on the list above. I really only skimmed it.
2.) You seem to be confusing two dissimilar concepts. Content farms and user-generated content are not the same thing. Sites like the Demand Media properties are clearly content farms. The distinguishing characteristic is that the content is demand-driven. Sites like EZA, Squidoo, and Yahoo Answers are clearly user-generated content, which is distinct. Obviously, some of the content is demand-driven (if written by an experience marketer, anyway) but the vast majority is not. Note that commercial intent is not a factor here. Calling these user-generated sites content farms is akin to saying cows are a species of fish. Surely you are not suggesting that internet users should not be allowed to write whatever content they see fit on whatever site(s) are willing to publish them, are you? By that definition, geocities was a content farm and so is WordPress.com.

Kyle – this, right here, IS the market. In operation, correcting a fault.

If people like this block list, they’ll use it. I like it and I’m using it. The sites on the list will lose traffic, they’ll (hopefully) try to lift their game to avoid being put on other such lists. Everybody wins.

No, this is a tiny subniche of the market that thinks they are speaking for the majority when they aren’t. The average user is quite happy with the search results they get, even when they land on ehow, because it answers a question.

A more intelligent position would be “I don’t like these sites so I will choose not to visit them; however, I recognize that many people may derive value from them.” The tone taken here is “these sites are all bad because I say they are and if you disagree with me you are obviously stupid and/or a content farm owner yourself.” See the difference between those two positions? The first is respectable. The second is not.

User created content? Like, cutting and pasting from wikipedia, or another farm article? That kind of content? Or maybe the kind where you stick in a few of you own affiliate links while you’re at it? Face it, you’re “content” does nothing but clog up the tubes. And now, thanks to the extension and this list, I never have to sift through your so-called content again. It’s like you, the sites you “write” for, and all the shady, scammy, tripe you churn out just disappeared from the Internet. I’m in relevant-results paradise.

@rubberpants, well now you’ve completely lost all credibility. The vast majority of content farms algorithmically reject submissions that contain even small snippets of content from elsewhere on the web. You couldn’t copy and paste from wikipedia even if you tried, nor could you evade the filter by changing around a few sentences. You could rewrite the entire article from scratch but then, by definition, the new article would be every bit as relevant as the old since it would contain the same information.

The affiliate link issue is something entirely different, and the vast majority of content farms do not allow them at all. A few, such as hubpages and squidoo, do. But none of the Demand Media properties do and nor do 90% of the rest. Get your facts straight.

I am blocking them, as are many others, cos we think they are low grade spammy nonsense.
I know, I created some of them myself – and they are at least as bad as the majority.

There has NEVER been an instance where I clicked a Squidoo link in the SERPs and benefited from the experience.

Perhaps I am wrong, and you are right, in which case Google will soon spot that only a handful of people are blocking Squidoo and you will be OK ….. hmm.. somehow I think we both know which way it will really go though.

4eyes, I would bet $100,000 (nope, not a typo: $100,000) that there HAS been an instance where you clicked on Squidoo and benefited from the experience. You just don’t remember it because you suffer from an extreme case of availability bias.

Sure, just as soon as you submit proof of your claims. Just a hint, whenever you use words like “never” or “always,” it’s an immediate clue that you’re full of crap. If you said “most of the time Squidoo results are not useful, but occasionally I have run across some decent content” we would be much more likely to believe you. I would have respected your opinion and, while disagreeing with it, would have moved on. But you had to go out and use the “never” word, which automatically trips my BS alarm.

@dsl, it is unlikely you would have remembered it. Sorry, but remembering both visiting a certain page on the web (amongst the hundreds of thousands you’ve visited in the last few years) and remembering your exact reaction to is as opposed to every other page you’ve ever visited is not on the same level as climbing Everest. Get real.

You’re quickly becoming a troll Kyle. It’s quite possible to honestly know that you have never perceived value from a Squidoo lens. I remember Seth Godin’s marketing lead up to its launch and I remember the day it launched. I also remember being disappointed and then watching it quickly fall into very low quality content stuffed with affiliate links and pathetic attempts at backlinks. It was actually quite similar to Mahalo–lots of hype only to result in a subpar product aimed at juicing long tail SEO.

Just to show I’m not full of shit, here’s a post of mine about Seth Godin from 2005 (a few months before Squidoo launched).

Certainly possible, but extraordinarily unlikely. Just because something is conceivable doesn’t make it true. It is an empirical fact that people consistently and systematically overestimate the incidence of common phenomena and consistently and systemically underestimate the incidence of rare phenomena. It is also empirical fact that memory is reconstructive, meaning it isn’t actually stored anywhere. When you remember something, you aren’t retrieving it from some biological hard drive, you are actually reconstructing it again from scratch based on a few important clues. Did you ever play the telephone game as a kid? If so, you know how accurate that usually is. There is nothing trollish about calling out somebody for making a ridiculous statement such as the fact that they remember EVERY SINGLE visit to a certain domain as well as their corresponding reaction to it. Yeah, it’s possible, but it’s more likely a meteor will hit the earth tomorrow. I have no doubt that you honestly THINK you have never once received value from any squidoo lens you’ve ever seen, but come on. Be reasonable. You don’t even remember 0.1% of the squidoo pages you’ve seen, much less your reaction to them.

Thank you so much for listing the Firefox add-on. (I do NOT want to install Chrome.) I just installed the add-on. It does block the websites from showing. However, the add-on feature of importing a list of sites does not work. Oh well – no big deal. Thanks again!

That will work, but when you do it the way it’s meant to be done Google gets notified of your choice to block the site. That should help them better identify content farms and low quality sites, so I’m inclined to give them the data.

That’s had AdSense on it for about three weeks, so it was definitely not made for AdSense. It was made so I can remember it later. When I set it up I didn’t find what I was looking for in a search, so I figured I wasn’t alone. Much like this list actually. Unlike this list it’s only helped a tiny handful of people (maybe two dozen). Feel free to add me to your block list though, I won’t be offended.

Because big money has been made on content farms already (e.g. Demand Media), Ask.com ditched their search engine model and is madly attempting to leverage their massive audience (from the search engine which handled 5% of the web’s queries, which is still a big number) to quickly build a content farm of the worst kind, stealing from all the other content farms.

Why else would a search engine site be setup to be crawled by other search engines? They are now trying to get google to crawl their site by stealing everyone else’s content, especially if those sites have been successful at stealing content.

JG, I meant to comment earlier that it’s a great list. I hope you’ll include ask.com on it too, because they are clearly one of the very worst offenders. With their high page rank, many searchers are subjected to their very crappy results, even in front of much higher-value content available on the web. This is where the attack on spam should be… against those sites that continue to have high PR, yet very low-content value.

Ask.com is simply regurgitating nearly all of the content farm sites. Nobody seems to have told them this is a bad idea. Being a content farm farm is their new business model.

Unlike content farms which typically have millions of articles written, wikiHow has under 100,000 articles. (We may have more pages in the Google index, but it includes user profile pages, discussion pages, and other pages that aren’t likely to show up in a Google search.) Similar to Wikipedia, each wikiHow article has been edited and improved by several volunteer contributors. Unlike the typical 350 word shallow article found at most how-to sites, wikiHow articles can be incredibly detailed. Many have over 2000 words, step by step photos and a video. There is a more detailed explanation of why wikis beat content farms here:http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2011/02/07/wikihow-on-why-wikis-deliver-higher-quality-than-content-farms

Another sign of quality: Over 1 million people have installed the wikiHow iPhone app.

One thing we do have in common with the sites on this list is that we show advertising. Yet, we are the only site on this list that let’s users turn off our ads:http://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:Why-Hide-Ads
Just click hide ads, and the ads go away for 24 hours. Or just register a free account, log in and we will never show you ads again. So even on the advertising front we stand apart from this group.

I hope you’ll spend a few minutes comparing wikiHow with the content farms on this list and consider removing us from this list. Thanks for your consideration.

Abusing the plug-in? Please? This is exactly what it’s for. It’s a personal block list–I could block Wikipedia if I chose. If you like Yahoo! Answers, don’t block it. I think it’s awful and it was one of the first sites I blocked.

FYI if you block a site that would have shown up in a search result page, there’s a link saying results were blocked and clicking it reveals them. So you’re not SOL if a blocked site really did have what you were looking for. But if you find one of the above sites handy, by all means don’t block it.

Yep, but keep in mind that doing it the way it was meant to be done notifies Google of your choice which helps them improve their rankings. Manually tweaking the local DB skips that step and Google doesn’t know what you’re blocking.

JG,
great and I imagine quite intense project to create such a list.
Nevertheless, I would appreciate if you would review Suite101’s mention on this list – I strongly feel that our site’s experience is built for readers, and with an editorial perspective at its heart:
* we are a quality publisher since 1996 with a very strong editorial team, and we hand-pick every writer we accept to the site
* our writers are completely free to choose their topics and work with professional editors
* we manually edit every article on our site, and remove any piece that doesn’t meet our quality standards
* we do encourage our writers to research what their audiences are interested in, but don’t compromise over quality
We are very proud of the site and community we have developed, and I would appreciate if you removed our site from this list.
Thank you,
Peter Berger, CEO, Suite101.com

It would appear you are indirectly saying Article Marketing in any shape or form is content farming.Ezine Articles has a good reputation and is very careful about what gets published. Every article is edited and they will not publish if it is not up to their stringent standards. I find the inclusion here of Ezine Articles raises a few questions about your list . Yahoo Answers does have some rubbish being an open forum…..but also has some very useful information. Maybe not for the things you are looking for. I have to wonder if you know what the average internet user is looking for, because these content sites quite often provide them with their information. My concern is I see several well known information based sites here Squidoo , Hub Pages for example and I also see some people taking as gospel your word that these are indeed Content Farms and saying they will no longer contribute. I would like to see some back up to your choices……and of course it is always subjective. I am looking and actually can’t find any place where you offer better alternatives……but have already had to remove one on the list. …..and been asked to remove another. Hmmmmmmmm!

I’m in no way an authority, but personally find eZine Articles, Hub Pages, Squidoo and the like to be absolute junk. I made this post to help others who have a similar opinion because when I searched for a list like it I didn’t find one. If anyone disagrees with my choices they can simply choose to not block these sites. It’s quite simple.

Most of the websites themselves aren’t a problem, it’s how people use them. I’ve seen lots of crap on Hubpages and Squidoo, but also some well-written and useful articles. It’s a shame, but any content publishing platform that allows anyone to signup and publish with very little moderation is going to be abused.

I think that the content farms which do not scrape content automatically (like Mahalo did – or still does?) or offer up-front payment for quick low-quality articles (eHow?), are similar to other content publishing platforms like Blogger (which has quite a lot of spam itself) or Weebly. Users there are free to write about what they want. But apparently most of the time they want to promote affiliates with a quick promo copy

Ah well, that’s just my thoughts. It is cool that it’s possible to block certain search results now. Your post seems to have stirred up quite a commotion with the owners of these content farms. I’m enjoy the show!

Thanks for the list. Nuking this crap out of my search results has already made my life that much better. Let me suggest cooks.com—it is not a wholly useless site but uses some seriously shady SEO tactics so that if you are looking, for example, for “vegan burritos” and hit one of their links, it will invariably send you to an index page full of random recipes for burritos and related foods that may or may not be vegan. Invariably frustrating, and always high up on the list of results.

I realize everyone is entitled to their opinion. But you know what they say about that, right? Well, before your “readers” take what you say as gospel, perhaps they should question your ability to distinguish “content farms” from alternative media. Because your listing of Examiner.com as a content farm is completely ridiculous. It is an alternative media, local content and national content, news and information site. A content farm publishes everything they get, whereas Examiner.com has a staff of editors and channel managers that will sift through submissions. It is true that if you search on Examiner, you will find someso-so writing, but on each local content main page (Denver, San Francisco, New York, etc) only local content that is ACTUALLY news and conforms to such standards as any news outlet has is displayed. No such editorial process exists on “content farms.” The freelance journalists and local content providers on Examiner work hard. often acting as reporter and photographer, covering news stories and events. The pay is not much but it is much higher than “content farms” ever deliver. So the passion for the writing and journalism must be for these local content providers, citizen journalist, alternate media freelancers.

Regardless, I still find Examiner to be very low quality and never want to see it in my results. Obviously we disagree, so just don’t add it to your block list. There are real people behind each of these sites and they will surely all disagree that they themselves are of low quality and should be on a block list. You’re an Examiner writer and think highly of Examiner. Earlier there was a eZine Articles writer who thought EZA was inappropriately on the list. Etc etc.

this weed needs to be pulled out at the root. for my habits its is the most nefarious farm going. the “articles” are slide-shows, assembled by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing … except, of course, page views. its PowerPoint as Content Farm. for a couple years i’ve been adding “-bleacherreport” to my Google searches in order to exclude them. it helps, but not completely. and there are plenty others like it that aren’t dedicated to sports but that also cater to guys. they call them ‘lads mags” in GB. lots of slide-shows ‘ranking’ supermodels or cheerleaders or some such group. it takes an awful lot to scare me off those subjects, but they manage. now that Chrome offers this add-on and Firefox 4 languishes in development i may have to make the switch.

neat stuff and informative – tx y’all – i hope to write non-trash for a few
meantime wonder why can we not “sweep” web of all out.dated trash –
just curious from this cat – xox btw can’t these comments start at latest
date rather than earliest?

[Disclaimer: I am a senior member of the volunteer administrative staff at Experts Exchange, and have been a member there for over a decade.]

Mr Gales,

I find it fascinating that you have chosen to list Experts Exchange, since there is no evidence you have ever used the site. One assumes that means you’re basing your opinion on what you have read elsewhere.

EE is not, nor has it ever been, a content farm based on the definition at http://rdsrc.us/qv7zmq (which is as good as any, since, like obscenity, nobody can define it but everyone knows it when they see it).
1. Yes, it has lots of people providing content. So does MSDN, the Apple forums, the HP forums, stackoverflow.com and quora.com.
2. Nobody gets paid to produce content at Experts Exchange. People DO pay to ask questions, but answering is free and always has been: https://secure.experts-exchange.com/registerExpert.jsp (by the way, if you do sign up, send me an email — since you collect the email address — and I’ll give you the grand tour.)
3. Content written by the volunteers is based almost exclusively on what people ask. (EE has articles and blogs, which aren’t always based on what people ask; hence “almost exclusively”.) But virtually nothing is written by the Experts with any consideration given to where it will appear on search results, or with specific high-ranking keywords in mind.
4. Sure, some content is shallow. It’s pretty difficult to be “deep” when someone asks where to get the latest Ubuntu release. On the other hand, if you want to get a step-by-step set of instructions for migrating Exchange from SBS to Windows 2008 Server…
5. Several years ago, a woman got tired of rewriting her response to “how do I make my HTML page print just like it looks on the screen”, so she wrote a standard response. Does the fact that people keep asking the same damn question today, and her response still gets posted years later, make it “spam”? Or is it just a succinct answer to a question to which the answer hasn’t changed?
6. So… linking to a Microsoft article that may or may not skip a step here or there isn’t as good as a post written by a Microsoft MVP who has actually had to solve a problem? Code written by a programmer that is tested and works and is specific to an asker’s problem isn’t as good as a link to an online reference manual? That’s absurd. For one thing — what gives you special insight into what is a content farm if you’ve never looked at the site?
7. This isn’t relevant to Experts Exchange. EE doesn’t discriminate when it comes to people asking questions; your question is just as valuable and important as Seth Godin’s might be, and you deserve an answer to it. If it happens to be the same question, so be it — but you still deserve your own answer. EE isn’t so arrogant as to think Mr Godin has a better command of English than you do, or is smarter, or is more efficient in providing sufficient detail that his is a “better” version of it.
8. What’s “diminutive”? Succinct? Less than 300 words? 275 words? 140 characters? If a response to your question gets you the solution, who cares how many words it is? The last I heard, there’s plenty of space on the Internet.
9. Well, duh. As long as people have questions, EE is going to have people answer them. But don’t blame EE because people think their problem is different from the same question that was asked two weeks or two years ago.
10. Doesn’t really apply to EE. Then again, EE has been around for 15 years and has a business model that works. The only people who see ads are the ones who don’t pay to use the service (or have earned their subscription by answering questions). No sucking at the venture-capital-teat, either. But you expect to be paid when you provide services to your clients; so does EE. EE just doesn’t hide the costs in products (e.g. Microsoft) or advertising (almost every Q&A site) or someone else’s money (every site that doesn’t have enough traffic to cover the bills from advertising).
11. See above. Pay, and you don’t see ads. Don’t pay (or earn), and you see a few, but none that pop up in the middle of the item you’re reading.

Is EE perfect? Hardly; there are UI issues and database issues and programming issues that — in part because EE has been through several major changes to its code base over the years — need to be resolved. Because EE has some unique aspects, there are user issues that don’t apply to other sites. And like any business that has been around that long, it has its own way of doing things, some of which are probably anachronistic.

My first GreaseMonkey script years ago was to remove all of the ads from “experts”-exchange so I wouldn’t have to scroll to the bottom. Soon after, I decided the links were worthless and erased it from Google results altogether. You are correct that it isn’t technically a content farm. Perhaps it’s perceived as useful by the suckers who pay to ask questions. But as SERPS go, it is garbage. Also, last time I checked, the site was still cloaking, i.e. providing different content to GoogleBot than what is presented to users who visit the links without a Google referrer. It’s a wonder that the site hasn’t been officially banned.

How can I block news about the wedding in the UK on Google news. I am sick of it and don’t want to even have to scroll past this type of news. I would like to block it from appearing completely. Is that possible?

JG, you can add http://www.yoexpert.com to the list. We were recently approached by them to have “free, custom blog posts or articles” written about our business topic as long as we mentioned the author’s name and linked to their “category” on the yoexpert.com website. They couldn’t even get the name of our specialty field correct, but insisted that they have writers who “have a lot of experience writing about your industry.” Sure they do.

I’ve noticed a domain, wn.com, that looks suspiciously like a content farm cropping up a lot in my recent search results. It calls itself a news network founded in 1995. Anybody have information on this site, or an argument for or against it?

It looks like they scrape news sites (including a lot of local sites) to masquerade as an actual news site. Not a strict content farm as they don’t even create their own spam, but definitely something I’d block from my own SERPs.

I think . . . that I will not use anyone’s list. Rather I will let this process be “organic”, the way it is meant to be. I will only block sites that keep coming up in my searches and annoying me with what I consider useless (to me) content. And I will block sites that keep dominating my searches when I’m trying to find quality content (thus blocking link farms organically).

Is that not how this is supposed to work?

And if it worked that way, we would be individually and then coming together as a whole to “speak” our preferences. The theory is a good one . . . but I do believe it needs to be just a natural process.

In other words, “I don’t need anybody’s #@*&! list. I have the ability to think for myself. Yep. I do.

While you cannot argue that these sites are content farms, by doing something like you suggest, you effectively block ‘excellent’ content as well as spam. Would you do the same for blogger.com, wordpress.com? or any other blogging platform – blogs are just as bad as these content farms…

Google have stated that they want quality content – so why punish an entire site simply because some of the content is pure – each article / piece of content should be judged equally – not because it happens to be posted on Squidoo, Xomba etc.

None of the sites I block have content that I want to see. There are some blogspot and wordpress sites I want to see, so I don’t block them. Blogs aren’t just as bad, there are many bloggers out there who aren’t writing spam articles for SEO juice.

“Ways to get traffic” almost always means low value. “Article submission sites” always means low value. These are shit sites with shit content. I blocked them as soon as I had the opportunity and have never missed them. If you don’t agree, don’t block them–that’s why this is a personal blacklist.

Thank you so much for this – I just noticed this feature today after backing out of some crappy sites that were cluttering the top results while I was searching for some gear demos – and guess what? They’re all full of fluff, and now instead I get directed to specialized forums that are single-topic specific. Takes a bit more time, but good god is the information so much more valuable.

Thanks for the list – you’ve helped me to clear out the top offenders, but I’ll surely be adding plenty of my own. Props to you, and props to Google for including this little ‘block future results’ tab in searches now.

Stay away from them, especially Suite101, unless you want to make 1 euro, which you are not going to get because they pay you only if you have made 10 bucks plus! Their editors are pathetic, they don’t correct grammatical or spelling mistakes (I had to correct one editor’s spelling mistakes once) and they have crappy senior editors with dubious skills and past. The vast majority of its writers are boring retirees with lots of spare time or naive newbies (like me). And do not fall for the ones that seem to have a “glossy” CV (if the CV is actual). Why would they write for pennies (literally)
and for such a site?

If you want to get experience, start your blog or write some articles volunteerily, but for most reputable sites. Suite has zero credibility and you will get no more than 20 page viewers a day. All in all, content farms promise to make you a professional but they only make you a content farm writer, eager to produce as many articles as possible whereas these articles will have zero value in the real journalism market…

Kudos, excellent work! So far it seems that anyone who’s questioned the list was either affiliated with a content farm or someone who’s just too stupid to tell good content from bad. However, I would definitely add About.com, easily one of the worst offenders as others have said. To it’s credit, I love going through About.com to see just HOW bad the articles get for laffs.

My favorite quote so far was that troll Kyle’s: “the nerds (who are the only ones complaining about this) wouldn?t know ?quality content? if it jumped up and bit them on the ass”. Well, first off, according to Merriam-Webster, a big part of being a nerd is being “slavishly devoted to intellectual or academic pursuits”. So, in other words the poster is saying that stupid people are better suited for judging content quality? Lol! Let’s get one thing straight. Those stupid people are the only ones getting something “useful” out of these sites, and only because they haven’t stumbled across a better alternative because they’re too stupid to know how to weed through the crap on a typical SERP. These are the same people who click the big shiny Download ad instead of the actual unassuming download links, as well, and are the only reason sites like these exist. Frankly, as someone who constantly has to “teach” my less tech-savvy family members how to browse the web, these sites just add to their helplessness and my frustration. I’m sending them all this list, along with instructions (I guarantee it will save me a few “tech calls” down the road).

For those defending user-created content, it doesn’t matter if the site fits some strict definition of “content farm”. Stop mincing words. If a site is nothing but ads and questionable info, that’s close enough. The world is full of stupid people, so if you create a site where they can freely publish articles, you’ll get a lot of stupid articles.

I’ve never been to Squidoo, so on a whim, I went to the Squidoo main page and clicked on the first link I saw, regarding LiveScribe SmartPens, something I’ve never looked into. What a joke! Wikipedia gave me more information in 3 sentences. While it’s nice that the author and all of her commenters think it’s nice they all think SmartPens are “neat” and “super cool”, they probably think the same thing about FarmVille.

Like posting questions on Yahoo.Answers? Try a FORUM, it’s like Yahoo Answers, only you’ll get a start a discussion with people who are passionate about the given topic instead of being blasted with simplistic answers from 13 year olds. Like Squidoo? You may be beyond hope.

I like to see the answer to my question in my search results, regardless of the source. I made dinner last night based entirely on a livestrong post that ranked high for “How to Bread Fish,” and was optimized for mobile so I could grab what I needed while at the store.

The best answers to my questions are useless if they are hard to find, which is why these sites are so SEO heavy.

Thanks for the handy list of links, but I have to say–and I have no connection whatsoever to the site, other than having paid to subscribe to it some years ago–I disagree that ExpertsExchange.com is a content farm.

To the contrary, I’d contend that they are the anti-thesis of a content farm, as their posts are often very detailed and knowledgeable. It’s not just SEO bait.

In fact, I’ve noticed that when I do a search for a particularly obscure programming question, ExpertsExchange.com is sometimes the only useful result that I get. It’s happened often enough for me to be tempted to re-subscribe.

Yes, that content is behind a pay wall, but that’s not the same thing. Those results may be inaccessible to most surfers, but they advertise premium content, not content farm crap.

JG, another thanks for compiling this. I’m bookmarking the site. Google’s ‘built-in’ search result blocking capability STILL seems to be broken, so I’ve re-added the Google block extension again for now.

Blocking an entire domain because it’s labeled “a content farm” seems to be throwing the baby out with the bath water. Not every article on these sites is trash. Certainly, there is a high percentage junk on these content farms, but there are some real informative nuggets in the trash pile. Many of the authors that contribute to those sites do real research and are conscientious, professional writers. Knowing the source is certainly important when trying to find real information on the net. Looking at the author, their background, and other writings tells more than what site they chose to publish on. Where they published is more a matter of getting paid for their effort than it is about prejudicially dismissing their work because of the domain name.

Full Disclosure: I used to contribute to one of these sites, but removed my writings due to differences of opinion about how the site was managed. I know many of the authors who contribute to these sites and they put in real work when writing their articles. I also know that many of the contributors to these domains couldn’t write their phone number correctly on the back of a paper bag. Those contributors don’t bother with research and just want a quick buck. It’s a coin toss on what shows up in a search.